01/03/09: Frigid 10K

The Dallas Running Club held their Frigid 10K (and 5K, but I didn’t run that so it’s an afterthought) two days early; they ran it on Saturday when the tempature at 8:00am was a balmy (too balmy) 65 degrees (with 90% humidity – best decision I made? Not wearing my sunglasses – they would have been fogged the entire time.) while on Monday it was 33 degrees, with occasional precipitation, at about the same time. Not that I’m complaining. In fact, quite the opposite.

I planned on holding back early in this race; I thought I was holding back, at least some, with an 8:44 first mile. But after an 8:58 second mile, I knew it would be a struggle – a Titanic struggle – to maintain that pace for another four miles. Awareness was gradually dawning that running only three times for a total of 16 miles since the White Rock Half wasn’t such a good idea, especially when one of those runs, a nine-mile loop of White Rock Lake, was done just two days prior to my current race. Somehow I had managed to simultaneously undertrain and overtrain.

I ran a pair of 8:53s – one good thing about this race, because of repairs to the spillway, we couldn’t use the shaky bridge and had to run on Garland Road instead – and then in the fifth mile I learned how much rust accrued during my little running vacation: I ran, no walking, ran that mile in 9:22 and it’s not like I was holding back – that was all I had. On a positive note, when I needed a walking break at the end of that less-than-stellar mile, I knew it wasn’t like I was tanking a really good race. But on the downside, I got passed at the end by a guy who hadn’t beaten me in a race since 2006 – according to athlinks.com, I had beaten him nine straight times, including by nearly seven minutes in a five-mile race last year. Even the downside has an upside, though – if that doesn’t motivate me to get my ass in gear and start running more, nothing will.

I took advantage of the race to renew my membership in the Dallas Running Club, which cost me $25 this time around. Last year it cost me $20 which meant I had to run two of the free club races ($10 for nonmembers) to break even; I ran two (the Frigid 5K and the Bloomin’ Four Mile) and also saved $5 with a member’s discount for the White Rock’N’Roll Five-Mile which is a club race on steroids – it’s one of three that members have to pay an entry fee, the others being the Trinity River Levee Run and the Dallas Half Marathon, which they like to call The Half. At any rate, if I do the same races this year that I did last year, I will break even, at least.

For my rousing finish of 56:52 (57:04 according to them), I finished 164th out of 310 overall, 115 out of 177 among all men, and 15 out of 21 in my age group. In other words, I didn’t medal.